December 14th, 2010

The Steiner chain is a set of circles inside an outer circle, where all circles are touching their neighbor in a single point. Naturally the first version within Flash is already made by Mario Klingemann in 2002 to create some nice artwork. He also has a AS3 version in his libs.

My version is rather optimized for runtime purpose, does not create objects in runtime.

Press UP/DOWN to add/remove circles to the steiner chain.
Press RIGHT/LEFT to adjust the rotation speed.
Ensure keyboard focus (Click once in the Flash movie)

This could be a new way to navigate within an application:
- Circles receive focus each time they become the “biggest” instance on the face of the main circle.
- Clicking the red circle allows access to information associated with the focused circle by firing an event.

Hi…
I notice, in the wikipedia steiner chain
entry, that the ~speed of the centers of
the steiner circles following an ellipse
seems to roughly follow an inverse square
law (a la Kepler). Is there anything to
this?
Thanks,
Gene